Ocean Unit

A17's Ocean unit this spring ended up so large that instead of using a file folder lapbook, we put everything into a Bare Book. Bare Books can be purchased in a variety of sizes and are great for big projects or something that is ongoing like our Flat Stanley project. This ocean book contains resources from Homeschoolshare, project packs Under the Sea and Clownfish Adventure from Hands of a Child, activities from Evan Moor, Enchanted Learning and other online sites. These first pages also include booklets listing the books we read, for example DK Eye Wonder Ocean.

At the end of the book is a separate book containing all the coloring pages of various ocean animals. Most of these were taken from the Color and Learn series book entitled Ocean Life.


A17 chose to focus his report on what he called a "shamu" whale or orca. On the left page is a fact sheet containing things he wanted to remember from the books we read. On the right are photo cards and one fact of different types of whales. Last is a whale pop up book featured in a previous post

A17 chose which ocean animals to read about including dolphins, sea turtles, jellyfish, star fish and sea dragons.

Underneath the minit books for dolphin pod and echolocation, A17 put Boardmaker pictures for the definitions. For mammals in the ocean he used dolphin and whale.

This page uses Boardmaker pictures to describe why ocean are important and has some glitter fish.To go along with the Clownfish Adventure lapbook, we watched the Nemo movie and read a book called Just Keep Swimming. These pages include minit books about clownfish and manta rays, and information on characters on the Nemo movie including the Tank Gang and Bruce the great white shark!

We made several more pop up books based on the whale pattern. This one is called My Book About Dory.We included photos of some of the art projects that A17 enjoyed. You can find these posts here.

The last couple of pages are pocket pages that contain several books on ocean animals we found on Enchanted Learning and in our Evan Moor books.

Whale Pop-Up Book

As part of our continuing study on the ocean, today we studied whales. A17 made a very cute whale pop-up book. It was very easy to do by following the template. I helped with the cutting and the writing. I found this idea and reproducibles in the Evan Moor How to Make Books with Children Series: Read a Book-Make a Book. This book has projects for 38 different books such as Stellaluna, How to Eat Fried Worms and Peter Rabbit. The projects can be adapted for a variety of different stories. For example, the duckling pop-up could be used for any story about deucks or Easter. In addition to pop-ups, the projects also include layered books, pull tab books, slit books, and double hinged books.

Ocean Craft Projects

A17 is really enjoying doing crafts this year--especially foam projects. As part of our ocean unit we have completed several neat projects.

I found this foam fish bowl and bucket of foam sticky backed ocean shapes at Joann's. They were on sale and I used my teacher discount card.

The plastic fish bowl is an idea I adapted from Family Fun magazine. For their project they put magnets under the lid and a paper ckip in the fish for it to stand up. We couldn't get that to work right, so we weighted down the bottom with sand, shells, and glass rocks ( all from Joanns) and put foam shapes taped to pipe cleaners. Turned out cute I think!

The last project is an idea from the Hands of a Child Clownfish lapbook. I had to adapt it a bit for DS. Instead of using the pattern included in the pack, we used a foam shape. It's taped to a popsicle stick that was cut in half. We cut a styrofoam ball in half. A17 painted it. Next we cut pipe cleaners in half and stuck them into the styrofoam to make it look like anemones. We then stuck the fish in and put the whole thing on a plastic magarine lid.